There is a need for Catholics to engage modern culture, understanding and appreciating its positive aspects while debating its negative points, said the former president of the Italian bishops’ conference.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini affirmed this Thursday in a Vatican Radio interview regarding the recent publication of a book, “Confini” (Limits), that features a discussion between the cardinal and historian Ernesto Galli della Loggia.
The prelate stated that if humanity “wishes to go forward, if it wishes to seriously address the great problems it faces, it must have a broader reason, a reason free from the scientific spirit and from relativism.”
He explained that Benedict XVI’s invitation to “broaden the spaces of rationality” is directed to all of society, although in a more specific way he was indicating for the Church the “path of a genuine evangelization” of the West.
The cardinal affirmed, “For theoretical reason, it is an effort not to limit human reason in the proper sense.”
“In the second place,” he added, “it is an effort to overcome what Benedict XVI calls ‘the dictatorship of relativism,’ understanding that also in the practical realm, in the moral realm, human reason is capable of grappling with reality, with objectivity, and not only with the desires and tendencies of the individual.”
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